WASHINGTON, DC – Last night, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) took to the Senate floor to unveil the newest essay in his online series titled, “Wall Street’s War on Workers”. This is the third essay in this series and focuses on stock buybacks and the ways in which large corporations use this tactic to withhold profits from workers, and instead keep more and more of those profits for their CEOs and Wall Street investors.

“We shouldn’t be surprised that when President Trump and the Republican Congress handed Wall Street a windfall last year, those corporate executives turned around and plowed that money right back into stock buybacks… and into their pockets,” said Brown said on the Senate Floor. “If corporations want to transfer wealth to Wall Street, workers need to get a proportionate share of the pie.”

Brown announced that he will be introducing legislation in the coming weeks that would strengthen the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by allowing it to require all public corporations to pay a Worker Dividend. This provision would stipulatethat for every $1 million passed on to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks or dividends, corporations would have to pass on $1 to every worker.

Brown plans to release several essays on Medium to explore how Wall Street undermines U.S. workers as he offers solutions to grow the middle class and restore the value of work.

Last year, Brown unveiled a plan to make hard work pay off for Ohioans. For more than a year, Brown and his office studied the challenges facing workers in Ohio and across the country and compiled a comprehensive agenda of solutions.

Brown also introduced a podcast, “Canarycast,” featuring discussions on how to restore the value of work in America.